The Hacker

Molotov vs Dub Pistols

Rammstein

The Residents

Halsoverkop moesten in december 110 mensen hun huis uit, omdat de vloer van bijna vijftig woningen in flats in Rotterdam-Prins Alexander het weleens kon begeven. Nu is er nog meer slecht nieuws: het gaat drie jaar duren voordat iedereen weer terug kan. Toch zijn er ook lichtpuntjes.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma and Chief Content Officer Matt Booty told staff that Xbox's current economics "cannot continue," citing more than $20 billion in spending over five years, declining revenue outside Activision Blizzard King, console supply constraints tied to RAMaggedon, and an overextended studio portfolio. The memo stops short of announcing layoffs, but a Bloomberg report says substantial Xbox cuts are expected after Microsoft's fiscal year ends on June 30. Engadget reports: The takeaways are pretty grim. For starters, the simple math of Xbox's revenue isn't adding up to success. "Excluding Activision Blizzard King, over the past five years, we have spent over $20 billion on ongoing investments in our content, platform, and hardware subsidy, but our annual revenue has declined nearly half a billion during that time," the execs state. "Going forward, this cannot continue." They also acknowledge the impact of RAMaggedon: "We are currently unable to make as many consoles as players want to buy, and we need a new business model and partnerships for hardware as we remain committed to Helix." (Helix, in this case, is Project Helix, the codename for Xbox's new console.)

Then there's the kicker, a renewed admission that Xbox still can't support the many studios it acquired in the late 2010s in an effort to grow its first-party game ambitions. "We have found ourselves over extended as we executed on changing strategies in a landscape of more readily available content," the pair said, noting elsewhere that with so many good games, not to mention the plethora of other forms of entertainment available, "Going forward, our competition is attention."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Fomapan 100 with Mamiya RB67 and Sekor 90 mm

• British driver says pressure is off following bad run

• Antonelli 68 points ahead of Mercedes teammate

George Russell insists the pressure is off in the battle for the Formula One drivers’ championship. A ­succession of mishaps – combined with the exemplary form of his Mercedes teammate, Kimi Antonelli – has left him 68 points off the pace.

Sunday’s round seven is the newly styled Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix, with the Spanish Grand Prix shifting to a new venue in Madrid in September. Mercedes are expected to excel again this weekend, but it is the 19-year-old Antonelli who has established a firm grip on the drivers’ championship after five consecutive victories.

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• 63-year-old leaves Benfica to move back to the Bernabéu

• Marco Silva agrees deal to replace him at Portuguese club

José Mourinho’s blockbuster return as Real Madrid manager has been confirmed. The 63-year-old, who was in the dugout at the Bernabéu from 2010 until 2013, joins the 15-times European champions from Benfica on a three-year contract.

Mourinho’s appointment comes after a torrid season at Real Madrid, with Xabi Alonso sacked in January amid player unrest. Álvaro Arbeloa came in as interim head coach, but failed to turn around the campaign as Real exited the Champions League to Bayern Munich at the quarter-final stage and Barcelona cantered to the La Liga title. Disharmony within the squad also continued, with Fede Valverde taken to hospital to have stitches after a confrontation with his teammate Aurélien Tchouaméni.

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The party stalwart’s blistering attack is not just a problem for the prime minister – it makes the task of a successor far harder

John Healey’s resignation as defence secretary on Thursday morning was genuinely shocking. Mr Healey is not just a veteran minister, but a Labour loyalist who previously served both Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn. In an interview in March, he observed that he didn’t toil to rebuild confidence in Labour “just to see that wasted with internal chatter and commentary”.

Now he has maximised external chatter with a withering denunciation of the prime minister and chancellor. In his resignation letter, Mr Healey said that Sir Keir Starmer was “unable” and the Treasury “unwilling” to provide the budget needed to protect the UK – forcing him to make decisions that increased the risk to personnel and could make the country less safe. Having spent years rebuilding Labour’s credibility on national security, he appears to be demolishing it, weeks before Sir Keir faces a Nato summit. Doubtless he feels the damage was done by the repeated failure to publish the defence investment plan (DIP) – originally due last autumn – or match the armed forces’ expectations.

Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.

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Long-abandoned formats such as cassettes and VHS tapes are finding new life as consumers seek a digital detox

Ten years after the last video recorder manufacturer ceased production, the first straight-to-video movie for two decades – This Is How the World Ends – was released this month. The resurgence of vinyl began long ago; sales are at their highest level for over 30 years. But record buyers enthuse about the warmth of their sound and the generous visual expanse of album covers. In contrast, the new movie is shot in HD; the director acknowledges that those watching it on video will see a cropped, fuzzier image. The point of the exercise – beyond creating a buzz – lies not in the inherent qualities of VHS, but the effect of its rarity on the viewer.

When everything is available in high definition with one swipe of your screen, cumbersome physical formats that must be hunted down appear both nostalgically inviting and strikingly fresh. Last year, Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl was released in multiple physical formats, including cassette and CD – technically digital, but also enjoying a revival thanks to its retro feel. The title track of her previous album, The Tortured Poets Department, mocked a lover’s attachment to his typewriter, notoriously favoured by hipsters.

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The boffins on Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an experimental new language model this week that uses techniques originally developed for AI image generators to boost text output performance by as much as 4x when running on resource-constrained consumer hardware. It's free to download and you can run it with just 18 GB of DRAM or VRAM. The model, codenamed DiffusionGemma, is the latest addition to Google’s open weights model family. But unlike Gemma 4, which launched this spring, the 26 billion-parameter mixture of experts (MoE) model isn’t a large language model in a conventional sense. Instead, it’s actually closer to image models like Stable Diffusion or Flux. Rather than generating tokens one after another in an autoregressive fashion, DiffusionGemma generates entire paragraphs' worth of tokens at the same time. The process looks a lot like how a diffusion model turns what’s essentially static into an image through a series of denoising steps. As Google explains it, DiffusionGemma works by laying out a canvas of random tokens, and then refining them until the final output is reached. Compared to conventional LLMs, which are memory-bandwidth bound and require a lot of VRAM, diffusion models are a predominantly compute-bound workload, which is why the Chocolate Factory is positioning these models for local deployment. LLMs are autoregressive. During token generation, the model’s active parameters need to be streamed from memory for every token generated, making memory bandwidth a major bottleneck. In the cloud, inference providers balance compute and memory bandwidth by processing hundreds or thousands of requests in parallel. As you might have guessed, this isn’t something the average user running a local model on their notebook can do. However, many consumer products, like high-end graphics cards, have plenty of excess horsepower, which DiffusionGemma can take advantage of to boost output performance. Diffusion language models aren’t perfect. Google isn’t the first to explore this tech. Previous models, like DREAM or Mercury 2, demonstrated major speedups over conventional LLMs, but generally underperformed them in benchmarks for their size. DiffusionGemma doesn’t appear to be any different. According to Google, the 26 billion-parameter model falls just behind Gemma 4 12B in the GPQA-Diamond benchmark, with its main advantage being output speed, and even then it’s not as impressive as Google has made it out to be. The chart shows a roughly 2.25x speedup for DiffusionGemma over the 12B parameter LLM with speculative decode enabled. Compared to Gemma 4 26B-A4B, the speedup is nearly 4x when running a single Nvidia H100. DiffusionGemma is being released as an experimental model rather than an enterprise focused one, like we saw with Gemma 4. The model is available for download on popular model repos like Hugging Face under a highly permissive Apache 2.0 license with support already merged into popular inference engines like vLLM, MLX, and HF Transformers, with support for Llama.cpp coming soon. While local inference has largely been the domain of AI enthusiasts, companies like Google are increasingly leaning on the tech to cut cloud costs associated with their AI services. As you may recall, back in May, Google quietly began shipping a small LLM with its Chrome web browser. ®

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De blanke Nederlandse oikofoob Erik van der Maas, bekend van (nog opzoeken, red.), heeft de OCW taalgids van kaft tot kaft gelezen, kent die van binnen en van buiten en vindt, anders dan zijn eigen VVD-staatssecretaris, wel aardig om bepaalde woorden te wissen en anderen het ook te verwijten als ze die woorden gebruiken. In een debat met Martin Bosma probeert Van der Maas een deugdunk te scoren door hardop te janken over de woorden die de oud-Kamervoorzitter gebruikt. Hij bezigde namelijk 'Forum-termen' als 'blanke Nederlander' en 'oikofobie'. Zeer Normale Nederlandse Woorden. Maar die gaan deze VVD'er veel te ver. Van deze VVD'er mogen we straks alleen nog maar het woord 'BITTERBAL' in de mond nemen. En oké, dan noemen we de ontzettend kleinzielige bitterbal Erik van der Maas toch gewoon een ontzettend kleinzielige bitterbal, met z'n kleine bitterballetjes.